Auschwitz survivor, activist dies at 93

Thursday

Sep 27, 2007 at 12:01 AM

Berlin | Kurt Julius Goldstein, who survived the Auschwitz death camp and played a large role in fighting racism and anti-Semitism, died Monday. He was 93.Goldstein died in Berlin after a brief illness, said the International Auschwitz Committee, of which he was an honorary chairman. It did not elaborate.Born into a Jewish merchant family in 1914, Goldstein joined Germany's Communist Party but was forced out of the country when the Nazis came to power.He fled to Palestine, then went to fight in an international brigade in the Spanish Civil War. When that war ended in 1939, Goldstein was arrested; he was later handed to the Nazis, who sent him to the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland.Goldstein was one of fewer than 500 prisoners out of 3,000 forced onto a 1945 "death march" to the Buchenwald concentration camp in central Germany as the Red Army advanced.